totallygone

travel, at a tangent


No mo' sex

So I missed seeing the last episode of Sex and the City at the Midnight Sun, (known locally as the "Midnight Scum") one of the only bars in the world where you can guarantee that everyone there will be silent. Out of respect or veneration for nothing but its supersized video screen, whether re-runs of old movies (everyone knows all the punchlines, get the picture?), episodes of Ab Fab (canned laughter from both screen and clientele), or the most popular soaps. Personally, I find it eerie to be surrounded by a bar full of people not eyeing each other up, oblivious to everyone except Patsy and Edina - it goes against my gay grain. But I guess I'm yet to get with the program, so to speak. Instead, I watched S.a.t.C with my roommates Ernie and John. Ernie and I shared a shed tear or two over the cutest bits. John complained that the narrative resolution was too tidy. "But it's supposed to be!" Ernie and I chorused. John is the oldest of us all, and is still not with the pop-pap program.

NOW STOP READING IF YOU DON"T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENED....

So. Everyone lived happily ever after, even Samantha, who, we suspected, would pay lip-service to realism and homage to Steel Magnolias by dying. Au contraire! She doesn't - she and Smith are last seen in flagrante, her sex-drive resurrected by the love of a good (and intensely beautiful) man, and a great fuck. She's on top, naturally, wailing and writhing with the same vaudeville gusto as Blondely Ambitious Madonna. In this way, throughout the series, sex has been effectively de-sexualized with comedy. If you've ever started laughing during sex you'll know exactly what I mean.

So what did it all really mean? Here goes....

Samantha is so, SO obviously, a gay man - her female features a red herring to distract and mollify a middle America, still (!) not ready for male-male union on prime-time TV. Shopping, yes. Fucking, most definitely "no". There would indeed be riots! Samantha is a spy in the house of love - that same ol' love that, in 2004 may speak (and here in SF, scream) it's name, but not "I DO." The "threat" to her feminity (posed by breast cancer, a potential mastectomy, and of course chemo-induced short hair) is no such thing - she's simply coming out as a queer guy. Or coming "in," depending on your position. A sequel (set here in SF, naturally), giving her gender reassignment but no other change to her lifestyle, would provide both her character and its fans with the ultimate happy ending. Samantha as gay man, with Smith making the switch so he can stay with "her". And then they can have cameos on Queer Eye. Remember, 'goners, you heard it here first!!!

Sex and the City showed us its best towards the end. I'd always thought that the show - and its central character - rash-inducingly irritating. However, it turned out to be an intriguingly accurate barometer of high American culture (oxymoron? You decide). Charlotte and Miranda embrace culturally progressive and traditionally inclusive family values by adopting, respectively, a Chinese baby and a sick, infuriating, mother-in-law. The former and her partner are Jewish, the latter a complete bitch, so both plot-lines are eye-brow raisers. But it's Carrie who scores the hat-trick, the obvious ending being so obvious it in fact worked as a double-bluff.

Baryshnikov's 'Petrovsky' was, we knew from his cold treatment of her pals, a non-starter - we were, like her friends, waiting for her to wake up and smell the bad Eastern-European coffee. Naturally, trips to Paris were necessary not only to give the sponsors (Dior, Chanel (whose No.5 model Carole Bouquet played Petrovsky's ex-wife) et al) ample value for money, but so that New York's rehabilitation as the world's favourite metropolis - and the nation's current need to look to itself rather than Europe for cultural affirmation could be spelled out for us figuratively by the the story's narrator. It's like this:-

  • To hell with that awful old foreigner who wouldn't let career-girl Carrie go to her own ball. That's just NEUROTIC men. Instead, think BIG. Say njet to small-minded, detail-fixated, self-obsessed (Eastern- W.T.F!!) Europeans. Bring back tall, dark, handsome and American Mr Big!! Bring him back from Napa to N.Y, N.Y!!

  • Pedrovsky and French champagne? Merci, non! Mr Big and his Napa vineyards? YAY!!

  • To hell with Paris and its filthy streets. Merde on the Manolo's was really the last straw for our Carrie, driven to dragging on Gitanes by the stress of Parisian existance. Give us Guilani-scrubbed New York. So good they NAMED IT TWICE! Remember?

  • To hell with diamonds - a girl's best friends are her best friends. Read Carrie's discovery of her cheap-n'-cheerful "Carrie" name pendant and joyful abandonment of the string of diamonds given her by Petrovsky as a not-so-subtle metaphor for her re-discovery of WHO a girl really is and WHAT a girl really wants...
Everything! In America!


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